In a very dark part of my soul cinematic hacking is rolled with BAB...

I don't know how to justify it yet, but there it is. BAB + Int mod in most cases, but Wis, Cha, and Dex might all have a go.

And yes, hackers would have an ability like the assassin core ability .

(though in fairness to the "era-specific" comment, it might also fall into the same design space as the Spellcasting skill - outside of chapter 2 and essentially an FX skill point tax for a radically versitile pool of effects)

Lol. in a modern seting you can run Level 0, Level 1, and Level 2 programs and offer a feat that paralels The Gift. In near-future or tehnothriller espionage you open as high as Level 5 programs (plenty of room for an advanced class with Circuit of Power I to V on the odd levels). Cyberpunk settings blow the doors off with a full core class and Circuit of Power up to IX.

It makes perfect sense if you mark the Hacking skill like Spellcraft and actual get programs that are available through 0-2 but anything higher needs to be custom built and each level of build has a Complexity score that must be hit.

Having a hacker build up a list of programs known (may want different name - routines, scripts, something... will ponder) in the same way a Mage builds up a spell list could give a LOT of diversity to hacking styles. And lets you apply lessons learned from the spell selection fiasco .

Still needs to get around the problem of not having the other players sit around while the hacker gets to shine (and conversely, the hacker twiddling their thumbs while everyone else is having fun.

An actual CyberWar class needs to provide the player with practical overwatch functionality for their team (such as spending AD on their behalf) in addition to any fancy codeslinging abilities. The classic VR hack itself is probably best handled as a simple minigame the GC can draft the rest of the party into as ICe.

I love the idea of doing up Hacking like Spellcasting. The mundane stuff can be put into other skills, this should be straight-up cyberwarfare and nanowizardry. Limiting by tech level is a bit of a problem, I'll admit, since there's no similar limit for magic. I think you could have several different "schools" of hacking and just bar as required. Surveillance gets you into cameras and bugs, cyberwar debuffs enemies, overclock buffs allies, drones replace summons, maybe an "omniprojector" school for more direct damage "programs". (Thinking along the lines of the tech attack abilities in the Mass Effect series here, like Incinerate, Overload or Cryo Blast.) So if you limit modern hacking to, say, Surveillance, you can keep it to plausible hacks of security cams and maybe aerial drone footage, whereas cyberwar would be more at home at the tech level of most early Cyberpunk (see also stuff like the recent Syndicate reboot) and omniprojector is just shy of singularity-level tech.

I honestly think the "Drive/Ride" skill should be 4 separate skills. Ride, Watercraft, Drive, and Pilot. There is very little in common between those four types of requirements. Given just how many focuses there were in Spycraft for each of the modern skills, it would branch people out, even if being slightly annoying.

My most recent solution has been to rename the skill "Transport" and give it focuses. Using the "you are considered untrained without the focus" and you could have a pretty high Transport rank and still be painfully clueless about landing an aircraft - you'll hit the cap easy enough, but thats it.